Dr Delwyn Bartlett, a sleep psychologist with over 25 years’ experience in insomnia reckons sleep anxiety is on the rise.

“There’s a very strong link we have from the Hunt study in Norway that looked at 125,000 people over an 11 year period. If depression is untreated, you’re likely to ended up with points 2 and 3 of insomnia, if you’re insomnia is untreated you’re likely to end up with points 2 or 3 of depression,” she tells the Healthy-ish team in the latest podcast episode, available to download.

While anxiety was less clear, Bartlett says it’s a common theme with her patients.

“A lot of my clients have anxiety, but most of them have sleep anxiety,” she says.

“If you were to throw a whole lot of photographs on a computer screen and ask good sleepers to look at them and see what they remember, and poor sleepers or an individual with insomnia, the individual with insomnia will remember tired looking people, rumpled bed clothes, anything to do with the bed, moons, stars, owls, whereas for the good sleepers it’s random,” Dr Bartlett tells Healthy-ish co-hosts Dr Andrew Rochford and Maz Compton.

“So they have this preoccupation with their sleep – and as soon as it starts to get dark, or there’s something that comes up about sleep, they start to get all the physical symptoms of anxiety,” she says.

“Let go of the day, and let sleep happen,” she says, and “learn to do stuff in spite of a bad night’s sleep.”

So how much sleep should we have?

Dr Bartlett references large observational studies of about two million people, saying “about 7.2 hours” is the right amount of sleep, noting that people who sleep 6.5 hours compared to 8.5 hour sleepers, are actually often more healthy, because they’re out doing things like exercise.

Whether you’re a six, seven, eight or nine hours a night kind of person, her one bit of advice applies.

“Get up at the same time each morning and do something,” Dr Bartlett recommends. Yep, routine is the sleep secret you just might be missing.